In the Beginning

My memory reaches back to when I was still an infant wearing diapers and drinking formula from a bottle. We were living in a room in a farmhouse in the remote hamlet of Wehe. Incidentally, Weh would translate into woe in English. My mother used to prepare my bottle by adding malt to the milk. Perhaps this is why I have always liked the taste of malted milkshakes. In the room was my parent's brass bed and little else besides the Volksempfaenger (Peoples radio), a radio dating back to wartime years. There was no bathroom. None of the farmhouses had bathrooms. We used the outhouse out back. You stayed clean by bathing in the horsetrough out back. This was only feasible in warmer weather. In cold weather you heated up water on the stove and took a sponge bath. The memory makes me shudder. Water came from a hand pump out back. In cold weather my mother would have to boil water to melt the ice in the pump. They were times of harsh starvation. We were semi-adopted by an American family who used to send food packages. I wish I knew their names and addresses.

No one in the area spoke German, only the Saxon language. One time my parents paid a teen-age girl to baby sit me. She looked like a Valkyrie with long blond pigtails, like all the other girls in the area. When my parents came home, she complained "He will neet slaapen". I had simply refused to go to sleep.

While still an infant, I was sent to live with my grandmother who lived in a room in a farmhouse in Espelkamp. This was many kilometers away, too far for an infant to walk. When we visited my parents, she would tow me while I sat on her Bollerwagen, a flat contraption of wood slats and little wheels. My grandmother ( Franziska Emma Bussar) and I used the bollerwagen when we went gleaning potatoes in the fields or picking wild mushrooms. Even as an infant I learned to distinguish edible from poisonous mushrooms. I still retain a taste for wild foods.

I lived with my grandmother for many months. I don't know why I was sent to live with her. My mother claimed that it was because my father had developed Grippe (Influenza) but that illness does last more than a week or so. Perhaps they were just not getting along and I was in the way. Eventually I returned to live with my parents again

At one point my father got himself a huge motorcycle. I would sit behind him holding on for dear life as he went careening around the countryside at high speed.

At every opportunity we foraged in the wild for mushrooms, elderberries, lingonberries, etc. My parents rigged up a contraption to extract the juice from elderberries by tying a cloth between the legs of an upended chair and using it to squeeze the juice from elderberries.

My father worked at various odd jobs. For a while he worked as a waiter in an English officers club far away. I remember him working in a pottery, stirring up a big pot of red glaze.

With little money, there were few luxuries like Xmas presents. My father though was an artist and sculptor of considerable distinction. With a rusty penknife and scraps of wood, he carved me a marionette, a devil with jointed limbs, which he also beautifully painted.

Around the time I was 4 years old, we started becoming much more prosperous when my father got a job with the Kolbus company in Espelkamp. Kolbus started out as a blacksmith shop that then added a foundry and started manufacturing machines. During WWII, they subcontracted making canon shells for Krupp. Strangely enough though, the Kolbus family were Americans from Kentucky who, in the 19th century, decided that the Saxon land was a land of opportunity. Old man Kolbus used to take his blacksmiths on tours of factories in the United States. These blacksmiths were such superb craftsmen that they only needed to look a machine over in order to duplicate the machine. All this without the use of blueprints. Basically, Kolbus would steal the latest American machines without paying lisencing fees and sell them cheaper than the Americans could.

My earliest memories of the Kolbus factory were of a place that looked like something out of the 19th century with machines driven by leather belts from overhead pulleys. The blacksmiths only spoke the Saxon language.

Kolbus specialized in book binding machines. My father created the Kolbus emblem (still in use) of a partially open book, standing on a gear wheel.

The war had interrupted my father's education. He had just graduated the Gymnasium. He had however learned mechanical drawing and was hired to, for the first time ever, draw up blueprints of the machinery being manufactured. This came just in time because the economic resourgence began hitting the Saxonland and all of Germany with the speed of an expresstrain. Large numbers of refugees from the allied sponsored ethnic cleansing in the east were settled among us. Many of these were highly skilled engineers and craftsmen and many went to work at Kolbus. Farmers began selling their land and housing developments were established to settle these people. These people only spoke German because it was Konrad adenauer's policy to try to end Germany's historical linguistic divisions by mixing the populations. Saxon speakers from the east were sent to South Germany, German speakers were settled in the North among Saxon speakers.

As an engineering staff was built up, my father found himself the chief engineer even though he had no engineering degree. Unfortunately, because he was not a German citizen, he was not able to finish his education because places in the universities were reserved for Germans.

With our new found prosperity, we moved to an appartment on the corner of the Sutride and Luebekerstrasse on top of Bohnes pub. We actually had a bathroom and running water(cold water only) with a flush toilet. There was a coal fired water heater in the bathroom so that we were able to take a bath in any season. My parents bought the first refrigerator anyone had ever seen.

Doing the laundry, although still labor intensive, had become greatly improved. In the basement were huge kettles under which you would light a coal fire and boil the laundry. On top was a beam that you would use to agitate the laundry back and forth. Laundry soap consisted of an evil looking smeary substance that strongly resembled wagon grease. The laundry then was passed through a wringer and hung up to dry. Previously my mother would have to do the laundry in a tub using a washboard. She had to make her own laundry soap using wood ash and grease.

Central heating was unheard of. We had a coal stove for heat. It was also wonderful for roasting apples on top. My mother though, city girl that she was, never got the hang of lighting the fire in the stove. In desperation she began using hard paste floor wax to help the process. My father though flipped out at the expense. Then she found another means. Poppy seeds. My father had found a Wehrmach metal lined munitions chest that he had traded in for a 100 kilos of poppy seeds. You have to understand that poppy seeds are a necessity of life for a Hungarian. He was unsuccessful though in finding a place that sold a poppy mill. In disgust he exclaimed that it was incredible to live in a civilized country where you could not buy a poppy mill. Poppy seeds are extremely oily and are just fine to light a coal stove with.

There was limited shopping in a country store next to the pub. Sausage casings, sugar, salt flour. Simple things. No canned goods or prepared foods. We had a potato cellar in the basement where we stored a years supply. At one point a three wheeled sales truck appeared, selling fish from the North Sea. My mother used to animatedly haggle with the owner, whose prices always seemed to go up, claiming storms in the North Sea. We ate a great deal of herring. One of my favorite foods is still fried herring, canned or fresh. A couple of years ago I found a source of green herring (herring preserved in salt water) in a Russian store in Brighton Beach. I cooked myself a batch of fried herring. Pretty soon the apartment became filled with smoke and a powerful stench. My sons gagged and I have not made it since. My mother also made an outstanding herring and beet salad.

The only place to buy milk and butter was at a dairy several kilometers away. I would hang two milk cans on the handlebars of my bike and buy it at the dairy. One can was for regular milk and one for buttermilk. My father and I loved buttermilk. My mother was dairy intolerant and the sight of our drinking milk would nauseate her. The mere sight of buttermilk though would utterly disgust her.

In the village of Rahden several kilometers away there was a greater semblance of what would be viewed as normal shopping. There was, for example, a butcher and a Konditorei (an eat in bakery). We loved to eat in the Konditorei, preferably with great gobs of freshly made whipped cream on everything. We began entering the famous fresswelle where people ate with great abandon, following so many years of privation. My parents (and everyone else) gained considerably in weight.

Perhaps a little off-topic. land was formally measured in hektares, having displaced the older system of measurement in acres. Informally though, land was measured in an even older system, the Morgen. I believe a Morgen was the amount of land that you could plow with an ox in one morning (hence morgen). This would then be the same measure of land as the Old English Hyde of land. This is not surprising since the English are nothing more than local Saxon boys who made good.

I entered school. This was a long hike of several kilometers. One of our amusements was hanging out by the blacksmith shop in Rahden after school, watching the blacksmith shoeing horses. The days of horses were numbered though, as we increasingly saw the use of tractors. One day the rumor circulated that one of the farmers had bought a combine. We all rushed over after school to see this wonder. If a flying saucer had landed from Mars I don't think it would have equaled the sight of this combine. We all stood watching it in open mouthed astonishment.

Somewhere in all this, the local windmill took down its sails and substituted a diesel engine. Streets were being paved. Gas stations and automobiles were seen more and more frequently. Ways of life that had endured with little change for untold centuries were disappearing. To me though, until I die, the Saxonland of my childhood will always be home to me.